2:1 (Part 2 'Untangling the Thoughts of Noodles') A Deconstruction of the Literary Journey

To Blog or Not to Blog?

To conceive a new direction for this next blog has been quite a tricky task, hence the time gap since finishing Can’t take the London out of a Londoner. I still want to continue my writing and convey moments in my life in Israel, yet portray an experience in accounts less emotionally driven. I tiptoed down that path of showing my soft-side, and realised it was not for me. I cannot decide if it is appropriate to disclose all my inner thoughts and feelings to the world, to click onto, skim through, judge, mock and leave, as if my life was a shop window. There were recent news pieces of blog-scandals, where some individuals wrote how they intend to commit suicide, and others committing suicide in reaction to scathing remarks posted on their blog. I often question the morality of its purpose and my participation in the blog craze. Web-diaries have sprouted across the Internet world, as if literary exhibitionism is a new Prada fashion piece. Yes, people should have a forum of open dialect; although, I cannot help but wonder if blogging should avoid editorial safeguards, and if the essence of writing as an art form has become diluted in the midst of textual diarrhoea. I am not exactly Shakespeare and am very much playing a part of that craze. I would just like to hold back from having all my feelings gazed at by window shoppers and by those that do not really care.

Love Affair with Words

I contemplated the original reasoning for why I started to write a blog, so I could understand the direction I should continue with. My on-line diary was prompted by a request by my mother, advising me to continue my passion for writing; and secondly, to have an available source to know what is going on in my life, to satisfy her Jewish mother nurosis, without having to initiate a tirade of questioning every time we speak on the phone.

Another motivation, apart from the simple fact that I love to write, is to fill the gap created by an intermittent career in journalism. My ultimate, lifelong dream is to be an investigative journalist, to be Lois Lane, to research and provide a voice, via media channels, of ‘hidden’ societies found in the nooks and crannies of the world, remote from Western cushioning. A combination of glass-ceiling economic trends and fluid writer resources has left a profession somewhat saturated and remarkably difficult to enter. I was fortunate to begin my career on a news desk, but as mentioned in my first ever blog, you can see that this was not exactly a friendly welcoming into the industry, and left me running back into a cave of dissatisfaction.

A slight diversion, I glimpsed at my first blog for the first time in a long while yesterday. I cringed at the text on the screen, as if I was viewing a photo of a fashion faux-pas I committed years back. It was difficult to restrain myself from editing and rewriting this entry, leaving my words as they were first written. It would be a wonderful thing if we were able to rewrite history, delete and edit words muttered and to erase mistakes made. Well, life isn’t like a blog (that sounds rather cheesy) and there is no delete key, so I will try to hold back from the edit button and maintain the innocence in my writing.

The Bland Shop Window

Sometimes I think my writing is slightly ‘safe’ and ‘un-hip’. It needs to become a bit looser, a little more ‘Bridget Jones’ and risqué. My style has been labelled as ‘structured’ by some, punctuated, grammatical, ordered with paragraph spacing and titles. And this does leave me worrying how I appear to the dear audience … uptight, neurotic … okay, do not answer that, but my excuse is that I was taught to write by news editors. So, first on the list for this new blog is to be a little less emotional, and secondly, slightly more ‘lose’, so as to appear trendier. These two factors may not be able coexist comfortably in my blog … so I will simply let the words flow and see where I end up.

Untangling the Thoughts of Noodles

I will use this name in my new blog title. Other options were ‘Noodles in the Raw’, ‘Stewing over Noodles’. I am guessing you are wondering where the name derives from. Well, if so, ‘Noodles’ is a name I adopted at the age of approximately 3. Since I was born, my bedroom faced the house of the Greene family (pronounced ‘Green’, Grandma Greene bought the extra ‘e’ for the end, as to make the name more distinguishable). Mother Greene would often call ‘Noooodleees’ across the road every time I passed her, and following a few echoes from my brother Simon, who mimicked her in a teasing voice, the name stuck. It is funny how I grew into the name. From that young age, I developed into a lanky and skinny teenager, with knobbly legs similar to the shape of marmite twiglets. From age 16, my dimensions were redrafted and suddenly I was overwhelmed with buttocks and boobies … not so noodle-like anymore. It was if I had developed shopping trolleys in either direction, with the volumes of both sides extending as I loaded more food on. Nothing has changed since then.

Enough about my awkward body shape and let’s get back to the name. I feel ‘Noodles’ represents who I was, where I came from, who I still am, and is the username of my laptop, which Simon inserted when installing Microsoft Office onto it.

Enjoy.